The Five Giants
NICHOLAS TIMMINS is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and at the King’s Fund, and a visiting professor in social policy at the London School of Economics and in public management at King’s College, London. He was public policy editor and commentator at the Financial Times from 1996 to 2012. He worked previously for Nature, the Press Association and The Times, and was a founder member of the Independent.
from the reviews:
‘A splendid book – knowledgeable, readable and fair’
ROBERT SKIDELSKY
‘Nicholas Timmins has done something extraordinary: he has made a masterpiece of contemporary history even better. Updated, extended and more relevant than ever, this book is quite simply indispensable’
MATTHEW D’ANCONA
‘The first thing I did when appointed as Secretary of State at Work and Pensions, Education and Health was borrow The Five Giants from the House of Commons Library in order to understand how the issues I was to deal with had developed since Beveridge’
ALAN JOHNSON
‘For years now, old copies of The Five Giants have been changing hands in Westminster for dizzying sums – and for a simple reason. Other books just offer fragments of the story of British government, only this gives you the full picture. I lend my copy to new recruits at the Spectator not as history but as a guide to what they will encounter – and how the same problems keep surfacing again and again. The facts and the figures, the jokes and one-liners, the power and the personality – The Five Giants has it all. It’s possible to understand modern Britain without reading this book, but it’s just a lot harder (and a lot less fun)’
FRASER NELSON, Spectator
‘Timmins’s book is remarkably fair … the first comprehensive biography of the welfare state from 1945 to the present day [and] a pleasure to read’
MALCOLM RUTHERFORD, Financial Times
‘Nicholas Timmins worked on this detailed and readable book for six years – and it shows. Few books deserve being described as “definitive” or “magisterial” as richly as this one does. Its scope is enormous, dealing with the welfare state from its early inspirations to the present day. It would hardly be possible to read this book – whatever one’s political convictions – and not find much food for thought. It ranks as an extremely stimulating book which will be read for years to come’
CONOR MCGRATH, Parliamentary Monitor
‘A remarkable tale, remarkably told … The story speeds along, and there are some wonderfully funny jokes’
FRANK FIELD, Literary Review
‘Extraordinarily comprehensive without ever being incomprehensible’
ROY HATTERSLEY, Independent
‘Timmins performs wonders of narrative clarity, anecdote and human detail in a book that finds its chosen level somewhere between Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and 1066 and All That … There is something very moving about his rhetoric of transformation and The Five Giants will stir up strong emotions. It is impossible not to respond in personal terms to a book that is part of so many of our histories, woven into the day-to-day texture of our lives’
FIONA MACCARTHY, Observer
‘Readable studies of the welfare state have been few. Timmins’ blockbuster, though, is amazingly readable, brilliantly researched, and in no way flashy or superficial’
ANGUS CALDER, Scotland on Sunday
‘The Five Giants is a book which no one who speaks, writes or thinks about social policy will want to miss, still less to admit to having not read’
TESSA JOWELL, Health Service Journal
‘Ambitious – and successful … In these 600 pages Timmins dissects and organizes the 50-year period with skill and clarity. His book inhabits that territory between good journalism and academic research, which has so often produced the best contemporary history in Britain’
MALCOLM WICKS, New Statesman
‘Eminently readable … for those who have a neat interpretation of history devoid of people and accidents, Timmins’ book is a healthy but enjoyable antidote’
HOWARD GLENNESTER, Guardian
‘Timmins writes with authority, and much inside information, on recent history. He has written the best account so far of Tory social policy since 1979. But the larger achievement of the book is to place the era of Thatcher and Major in the longer term perspective of World War Two. Timmins is no academic historian, but he has made good use of the work of academics, blending their findings with flair and enthusiasm. The result is a first-class history in which a detailed exposition of social policy is combined with narrative pace and lively portraits of the people involved’
PAUL ADDISON, Independent on Sunday
‘Positively moving … Timmins takes trouble to chart the improvements in education, health and housing which the majority of people in Britain have enjoyed in the time covered by his book’
ROBERT WRIGHT, Scotsman
‘Exceptional … a work of prodigious scope and illuminating analysis, a text of true scholarship’
IAN MUNRO, Lancet
‘Outstandingly acute … a highly readable book that adds to our knowledge of the evolving history of the welfare state and provides an indispensable source for coming to a sensible view about its successes and failures. Timmins brings alive both the process of making policy and its impact’
RUDOLF KLEIN, British Medical Journal
‘The welfare state deserves a biography on a grand scale. Nicholas Timmins provides just that’
JOHN REDWOOD, The Times
‘A tour de force … thoroughly researched, vividly written and bulging with out-of-the-way information. The Five Giants is the ideal companion to the more discursive works on the post-1945 period such as Peter Hennessy’s Never Again. Not that Timmins stops at the end of the post-war world …’
ANTHONY HOWARD, Sunday Times
‘The best account of British social policy since the war’
DAVID WILLETTS, Times Literary Supplement
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
Copyright © Nicholas Timmins 2017
Cover photograph © Getty Images General Photographic Agency / Stringer
Nicholas Timmins asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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